It's that time of year in the world of college sports, when the taps are open and billions of dollars start gushing over everybody connected to the game.

Well, not everybody.

Football coaches put themselves on the auction block, eager to break their contracts with their current employer and sign up with a new one.

Colleges line up to bid, fighting to see how many multiples of the campus president's salary they're willing to pay. Conferences poach each other's members, members threaten to sue conferences for trying to hold them to their exit-fee agreements, and TV networks announce rights agreements for postseason playoff games.

Oh, and athletes prepare to sit out a year of their college careers for wanting to switch to another school. Or, they work themselves into shape after months of limbo because someone "improperly" paid their way to visit a campus.

Isn't anyone tired of this yet?

You might be, if you're among the group that's barely getting the table scraps from the cash being flung around the last few weeks. That group, as usual, is the athletes themselves. Sure, the NCAA is now in Year Two (at least) of figuring out how to make athletic scholarships match the actual cost of attendance. What a noble concept: offering a scholarship that doesn't make the recipient dig into his own pocket to pay his bills.

It's no easy task. College sports are a non-profit, educational entity. The experience of higher education and athletic competition are their own reward. Right?

Have no fear, though, that the powers-that-be will get to it, eventually — as soon as the various football-playing schools figure out how to split up the nearly $6 billion they'll get from ESPN to carry the upcoming football championship playoffs starting in 2014.

Until then, athletes like the football players at Ohio State — who are sitting home this bowl season after going undefeated because of the system-wide cover-up of an autographs-for-tattoos deal—will have to wait their turn.

And we can watch UCLA basketball player Shabazz Muhammad just be a basketball player, instead of a case number on the NCAA's docket, now that he's served his three-game suspension and was ordered to pay restitution for his crimes — roughly $1,600. The crimes: while in high school, somebody paid for him to visit two schools he was considering attending.

That $1,600 represents about one dollar for every coaching candidate linked to the open jobs at Auburn, Arkansas and Tennessee this week. Or, one dollar for every school trying to trade up to a better-paying conference.

The majority of those coaching candidates, of course, already had jobs — including Les Miles, who used Arkansas's interest to get a raise to some $5 million a year at LSU. … And Mike Gundy, who appears to be angling for the same at Oklahoma State, where he signed an eight-year extension less than a year ago. And Bret Bielema, who left a Wisconsin team that just won its way into the Rose Bowl for a third consecutive time on Saturday, to take the Arkansas job.

Still in the mix for various gigs is Butch Jones, who insisted to reporters Tuesday, "I have every intention" of coaching Cincinnati in this month's Belk Bowl in Charlotte, N.C. This was after he spent two days interviewing for jobs at Purdue and Colorado. So is Charlie Strong, a hot name at several schools, while his current school, Louisville, gathers up enough of a raise to keep him in Cardinals gear.

Not that Louisville would carp about Strong remaining loyal, not after the school had jumped from the Big East to the Atlantic Coast Conference last week.

Loyalty is important in this universe, though. You can be sure that among the life lessons they stressed to their recruits over the years was keeping your word and honoring your commitment. That's the lifeblood of college sports, and programs prove it by layering on every restriction they can think of onto players who want to test the waters the same way their coaches do.

After all, contracts mean something, don’t they? Ask Maryland, which is being sued by the ACC to force it to pay a $50 million exit fee for jumping to the Big Ten. And Rutgers, which also signed up with the Big Ten, and Wednesday, sued the Big East to get out of its $10 million fee and 27-month waiting period.

To be clear, money is good. Schools have bills to pay. (Helloooo, Maryland.) Indoor practice facilities and luxury boxes don't build themselves. More seriously, it isn't fair to begrudge a promotion to the likes of Gus Malzahn, headed to Auburn, or Darrell Hazell, moving up to Purdue. They earned it.

Colleges, conferences, coaches, athletic directors all have a right to improve their stock. It's their concerted, concentrated effort to deny those same rights to the players on whose backs the industry of college sports is built, that is heinous, fundamentally unjust and low-down, in-the-mud dirty.

Actually, that's not entirely true. What makes it filthy is how players are punished for exercising those rights.

After all, Gundy is flying all over the place trying to pick the school he wants, and he won't miss a game or owe anyone any money for doing it. And Rutgers gets to tell the people to whom it owes money, "Go ahead, try and get it from me."

This will be a much better time of year in college sports when Shabazz Muhammad is able to do either of those.